| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|
A person from New Orleans is always baffled by the racial baggage “Cajun” and “Creole” have picked up outside of Louisiana, in the minds of people who never did know what they meant. Trying to correct the misimpression usually only makes things worse, ending in name-calling and accusations, since it’s assumed that bloodlines and race are one and the same discussion, and that is not a New Orleans way of thinking at all. Just as New Orleans has a different calendar of holidays from the rest of the country, it has a different way of talking about who you are. Absolutely, yeah, Louisiana has an ugly oppressive racial past (and present), like everywhere else in the South, the worst of it post-Civil War (which may sound wrong but isn't). But the history of the whole idea of race is very different. The Civil War made a sort of "first principle" of race that had not existed before in New Orleans.
The culturally traditional New Orleanian relates to others in the community by thinking first and foremost about where your people are *from,* what they did and who they were, not what race you are. I have never known anybody, for instance, who defines Cajuns as a racial group. It's a geographic-cultural-economic-sociological category. The original Acadians were French, got booted out of Nova Scotia, settled in southern Louisiana with their (the old prejudice goes) dirty French and ugly music and low-rent ways. They'd had a rough history, and consequently were poorer and less well educated than the French-Americans living in New Orleans -- a lot less fastidious too, they'd marry anybody. And what became the dominant "Acadian" culture in southern Louisiana kind of took everybody else living there locally under its umbrella: Spanish, German, Caribbean, Native American, etc.
My ex is a Cajun, the real thing. He speaks some Spanish but not Cajun French. Like a lot of Cajun parents aspiring to have their kids come up in the world, his wouldn’t allow it. He'd be surprised to hear anybody call him "mixed race." Being Cajun is an identity, but it's not a race, any more than Belgians are a race.
As for "Creole" -- people are constantly squabbling about whom that word does and does not signify. It was pretty straightforward until about 90 years ago; everyone knew what it meant. It comes from the Spanish "criollo," meaning somebody of Spanish descent and American birth. (The Spanish really built New Orleans and gave it its distinctive form and architecture, which is something New Orleanians with French blood and French names -- i.e. practically everybody – do their best to forget.) The white Creoles were the crème de la crème of New Orleans society. They were born in America but descended from French or Spanish (or both, or sometimes even German) families who emigrated to New Orleans. This distinguished them from Yankees, Anglo-Americans and the European-born. It was not a racial designation, at all; no Irishman and no Brit, however lily-white they might be, could be a Creole. It was a prized designation, almost a caste.
There were also "Creoles of color." New Orleans was the only city in the South with a free black artisanal class, pre-Civil War. "Creole" meant the same thing for them. They had mixed French-Spanish (or other European) blood, the product of inter-racial unions -- I suppose originally from slaveowners who could not countenance having their biological children be slaves and freed them. Some Creoles of color *kept* slaves. (On the other hand, "the Free Creoles of Color of the First Louisiana Native Guard" were the first non-white regiment in the Union Army, right as the war started, 1861 or 1862.) An African black could never be a Creole, nor the mixed-race son of a slave and a Yankee, nor any northern freed black man or woman. Creole was Creole, period, a proud declaration of your ancestry, co-existing with but entirely independent of your racial identity.
After the Civil War, the Creoles of color as a class were destroyed by the depredations of carpetbagger economics. All those distinctions New Orleanians had always been so fond of and so discriminating about went out the window. The way the victors (the Union forces) saw everybody was a lot cruder and came to prevail: you were white or you were black. "Parishes" (counties) even started keeping records of precisely how black you were: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc. etc. I think they stopped fractionating at 1/16th.
I forget the statistic now, but an astonishingly high percentage (like 80%) of Louisianans are native to the state. (As compared to what, 20% in California?) Louisiana is like one of those small towns where everybody's family has been around forever and forever. They relate to you according to where you're from and whether your granddaddy and theirs got along or were swore enemies. Your race is part of that, sure, but not the most significant part. New Orleans has had three black Creole mayors that I can remember, whose being Creole was surely key to their being elected.
I would say that to most New Orleanians, nowadays "Creole" is not an indicator of race at all. It means you come from a very old family descended from the original French-Spanish (yeah, and sometimes German) residents of the city, you might be black, you might be white, you might be any combination thereof, but Creole is your pedigree. If it's important to you to know whether the Creole being discussed is black or white, you have to ask another question.
I don't know much about the Choctaws in New Orleans. They were really influential all around New Orleans in southern Louisiana, in Houma and Cocodrie and Thibodaux and even Baton Rouge, but their preference for living as a community, and for an agrarian or hunting-fishing lifestyle, made urban life unattractive to them. Too they had their own tribal lands in Louisiana until the mid-nineteenth century, when the government flimflammed them into giving them up. They were supposed to be relocated to Oklahoma of all places, but most of them wouldn't go, they stayed where they were on the bayous.
So, often discussion by outsiders is pretty uninformed. The rest of America seems ready to jump out of our black and white skins at the mere sound or smell of anything that smacks of "race" -- that's our fucking heritage, as American as apple pie. Well, and people have sensitivities about Valentine's Day too, what are you going to do, boycott Godiva? I say do like they do in New Orleans, where everybody borrows everything from everybody else if it's good enough to borrow. African-Americans dress up in Native American ceremonial costumes, white guys who can't dance make up second-lines at the parades, and people eating jambalaya call it a Cajun dish, not knowing or caring that it's just a juiced-up version of paella.
Too, for what it's worth, the New Orleans people I know are pretty frigging impressed by Brad Pitt and high on the efforts he is making for the city. When I was first told about it, I kind of reflexively scoffed, having no reason to think much of the charitable impulses of movie and TV stars (of which I have some personal experience), and I was promptly and firmly chastised for it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|